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Syntax I

I should be mostly around on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but for the purpose of “office hours” I’ll set aside 1-3pm Monday 5/2 and 3-5pm Wednesday. If you want to stop by to ask questions or anything, those times would be fine for stopping by. If you want to set up a time outside of that, just email me and we should be able to work something out.

Ok, I’ve looked over the summary I gave out a little bit after the midterm, and it did cover all of the material, so there’s no addition to the summary, you can just use the one you have.

Here is the final from last semester (and the key), try to assess how well this goes for you by Thursday if you can, so you can bring questions. I’ll plan to post a couple of other practice finals as well, but this can get you started.

And, lastly, here is an extra credit assignment (“Trees are easy to draw“) that you can hand in at the final if you choose to do it. It’s kind of neat, and it’s also a kind of a study aid, so I’d suggest doing it if you can. Can’t hurt. But it’s not required, and if you do part of it but not all of it, you can hand the part you did in as well.

It’s long. Sorry. It’s an hour and a half this time, basically a class period (and a little bit) long. It’s divided into a couple of distinct topics, however. The first part covers the issue with subject wh-questions that relates to at least a couple of the problems on the last homework. Then, the issue of questions with multiple wh-words is addressed (like Who bought what?), and the last part is about islands and phases.

Given the limited time we have left, it would probably be good if you possibly could get through this before Tuesday so that if questions come up while you’re watching it you can ask them. Tuesday is pretty much the main day for talking about the phases and islands part, and then Thursday will be opened up a bit more to talk about questions that come up relating to the practice finals and the course material in general. (But if you need to watch it in two sittings and pretend it’s two videos, that’s fine with me.)

Speaking of the practice finals, I’ll be posting those soon, but separately. And I’ll double-check the summary to see if I need to add anything extra to it. I may not need to, I think I included most everything up to the phases and island discussion. But, the plan is that I’ll put a practice final or two here, with the keys, so you can try them out in advance of Thursday, and I’ll also post this extra credit project for people who want to try that out. But first, I’ll get this one posted with the video link.

I posted two videos, Video 16 (handout 16) and Video 17 (handout 17). I split them up because they’re on somewhat different topics; video 16 finishes the discussion of PRO by talking about adjoined clauses with the “[ing] T”, and video 17 covers “V2” in languages like German and wh-movement. The latter one is the one most useful for the forthcoming homework, the former one kind of re-iterates some of the things we talked about in class. (Together, the two come in under an hour long—so they’re separate but individually shorter.)

I recorded the video yesterday and when I went to edit it, I discovered that there are insurmountable audio problems that means that I’ll need to record it again. So, it won’t be ready today, I expect that it will be ready Saturday evening.

However: I prepared a good substitute if you are pining for some syntax work to do. Here is a 28-page document that serves as a kind of “mini-textbook” summarizing pretty much everything so far, in a fairly concise way. It covers some material that we haven’t gotten to yet, particularly at the end. We’re about to start talking about the CP and the last couple of sections have discussions of what we’re going to be talking about, but it’s not really supposed to be a secret, so I’ve left that in. We may do a little bit more than what is covered in these notes by the time the semester actually ends, but this should I think be a pretty good reference. I added a couple of sections just now, including a table of heads and features they commonly have, and some information about possessors, adverbs, and adjectives, so I think this is relatively comprehensive.

Unfortunately, I need to be off campus during the time I’d normally scheduled for my office hours on 3/16, so if you were planning to come in for them, we’ll need to set a different time. You can email me to set that up, or maybe come Thursday instead. Sorry about that, and for the short notice.